Maryan Vane did not run like a lady; she ran like a rat in the wainscoting.
The velvet hem of her emerald gown was shredded, caked with the black mud of the estate's lower gardens. Behind her, the lights of the Vane Manor shimmered with a festive, mocking warmth. She could still hear the faint strains of the violin—the music of a gala she was supposed to be ruling. Instead, she was panting in the dark, her breath hitching in a throat that felt like it was lined with glass.
How? The word screamed in her mind. How did she know?
In the previous life—the one Maryan didn't know she had already won—Eliza had been a soft thing. A girl made of lace and apologies. But the Eliza she had faced tonight in the ballroom had been a glacier. Cold. Immovable. Fatal.
Maryan collapsed against the trunk of a weeping willow, her fingers clawing into the bark. A memory, sharp and jagged, forced its way through her panic.
She was twelve. Eliza was thirteen.
They had stood at the top of the grand staircase during the Winter Solstice. Eliza had been draped in white silk, a single strand of pearls around her neck. She hadn't even been trying. She had just stood there, breathing, and the entire room had tilted toward her like sunflowers to the light.
"She has the Vane bone structure," the Duchess of Thorne had whispered—Maryan had heard it from the shadows of the landing. "And that soul... it's like a clear spring. But the other one? The stepdaughter? There's a cloudiness there. A common sort of hunger."
A common hunger.
Maryan looked at her hands in the moonlight. They were shaking.
Every year had been the same. Eliza got the first dance; Maryan got the leftovers. Eliza got the praise for her "natural grace"; Maryan was told her "effort was noted." Eliza was the masterpiece; Maryan was the frame—necessary to hold the picture up, but never the thing anyone actually looked at.
"I didn't want your pearls, Eliza," Maryan hissed into the dark, her voice a jagged rasp.
"I wanted your air. I wanted to see you suffocate so I could finally breathe."
Three months ago, Maryan had been scouring the Forbidden Archives in the manor's basement, looking for a way to ruin Eliza's reputation. She hadn't found a scandal. She had found a hole.
Behind a loose stone, she had discovered a book bound in what looked like gray, sun-bleached leather. It didn't have a title. It only had a vibration. When she touched it, the shadows in the room didn't retreat from her candle—they leaned in.
"The heart that is empty is a cathedral for the Great Dark," the book had whispered.
That was the night she had met the Devourer of Ambition.
It wasn't like the Collector. It didn't want a ledger; it wanted a mouth. It was a cosmic parasite that fed on the "Less-Than." It promised her that she would never be looked over again. It promised that the limelight wouldn't just touch her—it would belong to her, because she would consume everyone else who stood in it.
Maryan stood up, her eyes turning a flat, oily black that swallowed the moonlight. She reached into the bodice of her dress and pulled out a small, jagged piece of obsidian she had stolen from the archive.
"You failed me tonight," Maryan whispered to the stone. "She saw through the poison. She saw through the Baron. She's different, Devourer. She's... haunted."
The stone began to bleed a thick, viscous smoke that wound around Maryan's arm like a lover's caress.
"She is a soul of sand," a voice hissed inside Maryan's skull—a voice that sounded like a thousand teeth grinding together. "But you... you are a soul of hunger. Do you wish to be the frame any longer, Maryan Vane?"
"No," Maryan snarled, her face contorting into a mask of pure, vengeful malice. "I want to be the end of her. I want to rip the years out of her throat. If she has come back from the grave, I will build a tomb so deep she will forget she ever had a name."
"Then give me the tether," the Devourer urged. "Open the door. Let me drink the jealousy until there is nothing left of the girl who cried on the stairs."
Maryan didn't hesitate. She pressed the obsidian shard into the palm of her hand, slicing deep. Instead of red blood, a pulsing, violet darkness flowed out, merging with the smoke.
The pain was exquisite. It was the feeling of every slight, every "common hunger," and every shadow-moment being forged into a blade.
Maryan threw her head back and laughed—a sound that made the birds in the willow tree drop dead from their branches. She wasn't running anymore. She was hunting.
"Enjoy your dance, Eliza," Maryan whispered, her voice now layered with the guttural resonance of the entity inside her. "I'm going to make sure your second life is much, much shorter than your first."